I. Father Ferapont

Early in the morning, before daylight, Alyosha was awakened. The elder had woken up and felt very weak, though he wished to move from his bed to his armchair. He was fully conscious; his face, though very tired, was clear, almost joyful, and his look was cheerful, kindly, beckoning. “Perhaps I shall not live through this day that has come,” he said to Alyosha; then he wished to make his confession and receive communion at once. His confessor had always been Father Paisy. After both sacraments had been performed, the unction began. The hieromonks gathered, and little by little the cell filled with the monks of the hermitage. Meanwhile day came. People began to arrive from the monastery as well. When the service was over, the elder wished to take leave of everyone, and he kissed them all. Because the cell was so cramped, those who had come first went out and made way for others. Alyosha stood beside the elder, who had again moved to his armchair. He talked and taught as much as he could; his voice, though weak, was still fairly firm. “I have taught you for so many years, and so for so many years I have been speaking aloud, that I seem to have formed the habit of speaking, and in speaking, of teaching you, and so much so that keeping silent would be almost harder for me than speaking, dear fathers and brothers, even now in my weakness,” he jested, gazing tenderly at those who crowded around him. Alyosha remembered afterward some of what he said then. But though he spoke distinctly, and though in a fairly firm voice, his speech was rather disconnected. He spoke of many things; it seemed he would have liked to say everything, to speak out once more, before the moment of death, all that had been left unsaid in his life, and not only for the sake of teaching, but as though thirsting to share his joy and rapture with all and everything, to pour out his heart once more in this life…

“Love one another, fathers,” the elder taught (as far as Alyosha remembered afterward). “Love God’s people. We are not holier than those in the world because we have come here and shut ourselves up within these walls; on the contrary, everyone who has come here, by the very fact that he has come, has recognized in himself that he is worse than all those in the world and than all and everything on earth… And the longer a monk lives within his walls afterward, the more keenly he must be aware of this. For otherwise there was no reason for him to come here. But when he recognizes that he is not only worse than all those in the world, but is also guilty before all people, for everyone and for everything, for all human sins, the world’s and each person’s, only then will the aim of our union be attained. For know, dear ones, that each one of us is undoubtedly guilty for everyone and for everything on earth, not only through the common guilt of the world, but each one singly, for all people and for every person on this earth. This awareness is the crown of the monk’s path, and of every person’s on earth as well. For monks are not a different kind of people, but only such as all people on earth ought to be. Only then would our hearts be moved to a love that is infinite, universal, that knows no satiety. Then each of you will have the strength to win the whole world by love and to wash away the world’s sins with your tears… Let each of you keep watch over his heart, let each of you confess to himself unceasingly. Do not be afraid of your sin, even when you have become aware of it, so long as there is repentance, but make no conditions with God. Again I say: do not be proud. Do not be proud before the little ones, do not be proud before the great ones either. Do not hate those who reject you, who disgrace you, who revile you and slander you. Do not hate the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists, not only the good ones among them but even the wicked ones, for many of them too are good, especially in our time. Remember them in your prayers like this: save, O Lord, all those for whom there is no one to pray, save also those who do not want to pray to you. And add at once: it is not out of pride that I pray for this, O Lord, for I myself am more vile than all and everything… Love God’s people, do not let strangers drive off your flock, for if you fall asleep in your sloth and your fastidious pride, and still more in your love of gain, they will come from every land and drive off your flock from you. Expound the Gospel to the people unceasingly… Do not be grasping… Do not love silver and gold, do not keep them… Believe, and hold up the banner. Raise it high…”

The elder, however, spoke more fragmentarily than has been set out here and than Alyosha wrote it down afterward. At times he broke off altogether, as though gathering his strength; he gasped for breath, but he was as it were in rapture. They listened to him with tender emotion, though many marveled at his words and found them obscure… Afterward all these words were remembered. When Alyosha happened to leave the cell for a minute, he was struck by the general agitation and expectancy of the brethren crowding in the cell and around it. Among some the expectancy was almost anxious, among others solemn. Everyone was expecting something immediate and great at once upon the elder’s falling asleep in death. This expectancy was, from one point of view, almost as it were frivolous, but even the very strictest elders were subject to it. Strictest of all was the face of the elder hieromonk Paisy. Alyosha had left the cell only because he had been mysteriously called out, through a monk, by Rakitin, who had come from town with a strange letter to Alyosha from Mrs. Khokhlakova. She informed Alyosha of a curious piece of news that had come extraordinarily opportunely. The matter was this: yesterday, among the believing women of the common people who had come to bow to the elder and receive his blessing, there had been an old woman from town, Prokhorovna, a noncommissioned officer’s widow. She had asked the elder whether she might remember her little son Vasenka, who had gone off far away into Siberia in the service, to Irkutsk, and from whom she had received no news for a year now, in church for the repose of his soul, as one dead. To which the elder had answered her sternly, forbidding it and calling that kind of remembrance akin to sorcery. But then, forgiving her for her ignorance, he had added, “as though looking into the book of the future” (as Mrs. Khokhlakova put it in her letter), a consolation as well, “that her son Vasya was undoubtedly alive, and that he would either come to her himself soon or send a letter, and that she should go home and wait for this. And what do you think?” Mrs. Khokhlakova added in rapture, “the prophecy was fulfilled even literally, and even more than that.” The old woman had barely returned home when she was handed a letter from Siberia that was already waiting for her. But that was not all: in this letter, written on the road, from Yekaterinburg, Vasya informed his mother that he was coming back to Russia himself, returning with an official, and that some three weeks after she received this letter “he hoped to embrace his mother.” Mrs. Khokhlakova insistently and fervently begged Alyosha to pass on this newly accomplished “miracle of prediction” at once to the abbot and to all the brethren: “Everyone, everyone must know of it!” she exclaimed, concluding her letter. Her letter had been written in haste, hurriedly; the writer’s agitation echoed in every line. But Alyosha had nothing left to tell the brethren, for everyone already knew everything: Rakitin, in sending a monk for him, had also charged him “most respectfully to report to his Very Reverence Father Paisy as well that he, Rakitin, had a certain matter for him, but of such importance that he dared not put off telling it to him for a single minute, and for his boldness he begged forgiveness with a bow to the ground.” Since the little monk had conveyed Rakitin’s request to Father Paisy before he did to Alyosha, all that was left for Alyosha, on arriving there, was to read the little letter and pass it on at once to Father Paisy, merely as a document. And even this stern and mistrustful man, having read the news of the “miracle” with a frown, could not wholly hold back a certain inner feeling. His eyes flashed, and his lips suddenly smiled gravely and with deep feeling.

“Shall we not see greater things?” burst from him, as it were, suddenly.

“We shall see greater things yet, we shall see greater things yet!” the monks around him repeated, but Father Paisy, frowning again, asked everyone not to tell anyone aloud about this, at least for the time being, “until it has been confirmed further, for there is much frivolity among worldly people, and besides, this case could have come about naturally,” he added cautiously, as though to ease his conscience, but almost not believing his own reservation, which those listening perceived very well. Within that same hour, of course, the “miracle” became known to the whole monastery and even to many of the worldly people who had come to the monastery for the liturgy. More struck than anyone, it seemed, by the miracle that had taken place was the little monk who had come to the cloister yesterday “from St. Silvester,” from a small monastery in Obdorsk in the far North. Yesterday he had bowed to the elder, standing near Mrs. Khokhlakova, and pointing to that lady’s “healed” daughter, had asked him with deep feeling: “How do you dare to do such things?”

The thing was that by now he was in some perplexity and almost did not know what to believe. Only yesterday evening he had visited the monastery’s Father Ferapont in his separate cell behind the apiary and had been struck by that meeting, which made an extraordinary and terrifying impression on him. This elder, Father Ferapont, was that very aged monk, a great faster and keeper of silence, whom we have already mentioned as an opponent of the elder Zosima and, above all, of the institution of elders, which he considered a harmful and frivolous innovation. This opponent was an extremely dangerous one, in spite of the fact that, as a keeper of silence, he spoke hardly a word to anyone. He was dangerous chiefly because a great many of the brethren sympathized with him entirely, and very many of the worldly visitors revered him as a great righteous man and ascetic, in spite of the fact that they saw in him unmistakably a holy fool. But it was precisely the holy foolishness that captivated them. This Father Ferapont never went to the elder Zosima. Although he lived in the hermitage, he was not much bothered with the rules of the hermitage, again because he conducted himself as an outright holy fool. He was about seventy-five years old, if not more, and he lived behind the hermitage apiary, in a corner of the wall, in an old, almost crumbling wooden cell built there in the most ancient times, back in the last century, for another very great faster and keeper of silence, Father Iona, who had lived to a hundred and five and about whose feats many most curious stories went around even to this day in the monastery and the country around it. Father Ferapont had managed at last, some seven years ago, to be settled in this same solitary little cell as well, that is, simply a cottage, but one that looked very much like a chapel, for it held a great many donated icons with donated icon lamps glowing before them perpetually, as if Father Ferapont had been appointed to look after them and keep them lit. He ate, so it was said (and it was true), only two pounds of bread every three days, no more; the beekeeper who lived right there at the apiary brought them to him every three days, but even with this beekeeper who served him Father Ferapont seldom spoke a word. These four pounds of bread, together with the Sunday communion loaf, sent punctually to the holy man by the abbot after the late liturgy, made up all his weekly food. His water was changed in its mug every day. He seldom appeared at the liturgy. Pilgrims who came saw how he sometimes stood all day in prayer, not rising from his knees and not looking around. And if he ever did enter into conversation with them, he was brief, abrupt, strange, and almost always rude. There were, however, very rare occasions when he would get talking with visitors, but for the most part he uttered just one strange word of some kind, which always set the visitor a great riddle, and then, in spite of any entreaties, would say nothing more by way of explanation. He did not hold the rank of priest; he was only a simple monk. There was a very strange rumor going around, though among the most ignorant people, that Father Ferapont had communication with heavenly spirits and conversed only with them, which was why he was silent with people. The little monk from Obdorsk, having made his way to the apiary on the directions of the beekeeper, also a very silent and morose monk, went to the corner where Father Ferapont’s little cell stood. “Maybe he’ll talk to you, since you’re a stranger, and maybe you won’t get anything out of him,” the beekeeper warned him. The little monk approached, as he himself related afterward, in the greatest fear. The hour was already fairly late. Father Ferapont was sitting this time by the door of his little cell, on a low little bench. Above him a huge old elm rustled faintly. The evening chill was coming on. The little monk from Obdorsk prostrated himself before the holy man and asked for his blessing.

“Want me to fall flat before you too, monk?” said Father Ferapont. “Arise!”

The little monk got up.

“Bless and be blessed, sit down beside me. Where’d the wind blow you in from?”

What struck the poor little monk most of all was that Father Ferapont, for all his unquestionably great fasting and being of such advanced years, was still to look at a strong old man, tall, holding himself straight, unbowed, with a fresh face, thin but healthy. Unquestionably, too, considerable strength was still preserved in him. His build was an athlete’s. For all his great age, he had not even gone entirely gray, with still very thick hair on his head and beard, once quite black. His eyes were gray, large, luminous, but extraordinarily bulging, which was even startling. He spoke with a strong stress on his o’s. He was dressed in a long reddish peasant coat of coarse cloth, convict cloth as it used to be called, belted with a thick rope. His neck and chest were bare. A shirt of the thickest linen, almost completely blackened, not taken off for months, peeped out from under his coat. It was said that under the coat he wore thirty-pound chains. On his bare feet he wore old, almost crumbling shoes.

“From the little monastery in Obdorsk, from St. Selivester,” the visiting little monk answered humbly, observing the hermit with his quick, curious little eyes, though they were somewhat frightened.

“I’ve been at your Selivester’s. Lived there. Is Selivester keeping well, eh?”

The little monk hesitated.

“Muddle-headed folk you are! How d’you keep the fast?”

“Our refectory rule is so ordered according to the ancient rule of the hermitage: during the Forty Days, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday no meal is set out. On Tuesday and Thursday, for the brethren, white loaves, a stewed fruit drink with honey, cloudberries or salted cabbage, and oatmeal mixed with water. On Saturday white cabbage soup, pea noodles, porridge with hempseed juice, all with oil. On Sunday, with the soup, dried fish and porridge. And in Holy Week, from Monday even until Saturday evening, six days, bread with water only is to be eaten, and herbs uncooked, and this with abstinence; and if it be possible, not to take food every day, but, as was said, as in the first week. And on Holy and Great Friday nothing at all is to be eaten, and likewise on Great Saturday we fast until the third hour, and then taste a little bread with water and drink a single cup of wine. And on Holy and Great Thursday we eat cooked food without oil, and drink wine, and otherwise eat dry food. For the council at Laodicea says thus of Great Thursday: ‘That it is not fitting, in the last week of the Forty Days, to relax the fast on Thursday and so dishonor the whole of the Forty Days.’ That is how it is with us. But what is this compared with you, great father,” the little monk added, taking heart, “for the whole year round, even at holy Easter, you live on bread and water alone, and what bread we have for two days lasts you the whole week. Truly marvelous is such great abstinence of yours.”

“And mushrooms?” Father Ferapont suddenly asked, breathing out the g of gruzdi, milk mushrooms, almost like an h.

“Mushrooms?” the surprised little monk asked again.

“That’s it. I can walk away from their bread, I don’t need it at all, I can go off into the forest if need be and live on mushrooms there or berries, but they can’t walk away from their bread here, so they’re bound to the devil. Nowadays the unclean ones say there’s no point fasting so much. Arrogant and unclean, that’s what their reasoning is.”

“Oh, it’s true,” the little monk sighed.

“And did you see the devils among them?” asked Father Ferapont.

“Among whom?” the little monk inquired timidly.

“I went up to the abbot last year at holy Pentecost, and I haven’t been since. I saw one sitting on one monk’s chest, hiding under his robe, only his little horns peeping out; out of another one’s pocket one was peering, quick eyes, afraid of me, he is; in another one’s belly one had settled, in his very unclean gut; and on someone else one was hanging around his neck, clinging on, and so he carries him about and doesn’t see him.”

“You… can see them?” the little monk inquired.

“I tell you I see, I see clean through. As I was coming out from the abbot’s, I look, and one’s hiding from me behind the door, and a big hulking one at that, an arshin and a half tall or more, with a great thick brown tail, a long one, and he got the end of his tail caught in the crack of the door, and me, I’m no fool, I suddenly slammed the door shut and pinched his tail in it. How he squealed, he started thrashing, and I crossed him with the sign of the cross, three times over, and crossed him to death. He croaked right there, like a squashed spider. By now he must have rotted in that corner, he stinks, and they don’t see, they don’t get a whiff of it. I haven’t gone for a year. I reveal it only to you, as you’re a foreigner.”

“Terrible are your words! But tell me, great and blessed father,” the little monk ventured more and more, “is it true, there is a great fame about you that goes even to faraway lands, that you are in constant communion with the Holy Spirit?”

“He flies down. It happens.”

“How does he fly down? In what form?”

“As a bird.”

“The Holy Spirit in the form of a dove?”

“There’s the Holy Spirit, and then there’s the Holyspirit. The Holyspirit is something else, he can come down as another bird too: now as a swallow, now as a goldfinch, and now even as a titmouse.”

“But how do you tell him from a titmouse?”

“He talks.”

“How does he talk, in what language?”

“Human.”

“And what does he tell you?”

“Today, now, he announced that a fool would visit and ask unseemly things. You want to know too much, monk.”

“Terrible are your words, most blessed and most holy father,” the little monk said, shaking his head. In his timid little eyes, however, a certain mistrust could be seen as well.

“And do you see this tree?” Father Ferapont asked, after a silence.

“I see it, most blessed father.”

“To you it’s an elm, but to me it’s another picture.”

“What picture?” the little monk asked, after waiting in vain.

“It happens in the night. You see these two boughs? In the night, behold, it is Christ stretching out his arms to me and with those arms seeking me, I see it plainly and I tremble. It’s terrible, oh, terrible!”

“What is there terrible in it, if it’s Christ himself?”

“Why, he’ll seize me and carry me up.”

“Alive?”

“Why, in the spirit and glory of Elijah, haven’t you heard? He’ll embrace me and carry me off…”

Though after this conversation the little monk from Obdorsk returned to the little cell assigned to him, with one of the brethren, in fairly strong perplexity, his heart nonetheless unquestionably inclined more toward Father Ferapont than toward Father Zosima. The little monk from Obdorsk was above all for fasting, and for so great a faster as Father Ferapont it was no wonder “to see marvelous things.” His words were, of course, as it were absurd, but then the Lord knows what was contained in them, in those words, and all those who are fools for Christ’s sake say and do even stranger things. As for the devil’s pinched tail, he was ready to believe in it with all his soul and with pleasure, not only in the figurative but also in the literal sense. Besides this, even before, before coming to the monastery, he had been greatly prejudiced against the institution of elders, which he had known until then only from stories and which, following many others, he had taken resolutely for a harmful innovation. Having already spent a day in the monastery, he had managed to note the secret grumbling of some frivolous brethren who did not agree with the institution of elders. He was, besides, by nature a prying and nimble monk, with an enormous curiosity about everything. That was why the great news of a new “miracle” performed by the elder Zosima threw him into extraordinary perplexity. Alyosha remembered afterward how, among the monks crowding toward the elder and around his cell, there kept flitting before him the little figure of the curious visitor from Obdorsk, prying everywhere among all the little groups, listening to everything and questioning everyone. But at the time he paid little attention to him and only afterward remembered it all… Besides, he had no time for it: the elder Zosima, who had felt tired again and had lain down on his bed again, suddenly, as he was already closing his eyes, remembered him and called for him. Alyosha came running at once. Near the elder at that time were only Father Paisy, Father Iosif the hieromonk, and Porfiry the novice. The elder, opening his weary eyes and looking intently at Alyosha, suddenly asked him:

“Are your people expecting you, my son?”

Alyosha hesitated.

“Have they no need of you? Did you promise anyone yesterday to be there today?”

“I did promise… my father… my brothers… others too…”

“You see. Go without fail. Do not grieve. Know that I will not die without saying my last word on earth in your presence. To you I will say that word, my son, to you I will bequeath it. To you, my dear son, for you love me. And now, for the present, go to those you promised.”

Alyosha obeyed at once, though it was hard for him to go. But the promise that he would hear his last word on earth and, above all, as though bequeathed to him, to Alyosha, shook his soul with rapture. He hurried, so as to finish everything in town and come back as soon as possible. And just then Father Paisy, too, spoke a parting word to him, which made a very strong and unexpected impression on him. This was when they had both come out of the elder’s cell.

“Remember, young man, unceasingly,” Father Paisy began, straight out and without any preface, “that worldly science, having united into a great force, has taken apart, especially in the last century, everything heavenly that has been bequeathed to us in the holy books, and after a cruel analysis the learned of this world have left of all that was formerly holy absolutely nothing. But they took it apart piece by piece and overlooked the whole, and it is even a marvel to what blindness. Whereas the whole stands before their very eyes as unshakably as before, and the gates of hell shall not overcome it. Has it not lived for nineteen centuries, does it not live now too, in the movements of individual souls and in the movements of the masses of the people? Even in the movements of the souls of those very atheists who have destroyed everything it lives, as before, unshakably! For even those who have renounced Christianity and rebel against it are themselves, in their essence, of the same image of Christ, and such they have remained, for until now neither their wisdom nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create any other, higher image for man and his dignity than the image shown of old by Christ. And as for the attempts there have been, what came of them was nothing but monstrosities. Remember this especially, young man, for you are being appointed to the world by your departing elder. Perhaps, remembering this great day, you will not forget my words either, given as a heartfelt parting word to you, for you are young, and the temptations in the world are heavy and beyond your strength to bear. Well, go now, orphan.”

With this word Father Paisy blessed him. Coming out of the monastery and thinking over all these sudden words, Alyosha suddenly understood that in this monk, who until now had been strict and stern with him, he was meeting a new, unexpected friend and a new guide who loved him ardently, exactly as if the elder Zosima had bequeathed him to Paisy as he was dying. “And perhaps that is just what really did pass between them,” Alyosha suddenly thought. And the unexpected and learned reasoning he had just heard, precisely this and not some other, testified only to the ardor of Father Paisy’s heart: he was already hurrying to arm the young mind as quickly as possible for the struggle with temptations and to fence in the young soul bequeathed to him with a fence stronger than which he himself could not imagine.